Word.ws English Dictionary

gone backwards

gone backwards is the past participle of go backwards.

Meaning of go backwards

Verb

go backwards (third-person singular simple present goes backwards, present participle going backwards, simple past went backwards, past participle gone backwards)

  1. To decline or deteriorate; to get worse.
  2. (obsolete, slang) To defecate; to visit the privy.
    • [O]ne day he expressed his desire of going backwards with such natural imitation of his purpose, that every body in the room firmly believed he had actually overshot himself, and fortified their nostrils accordingly.1751, [Tobias] Smollett, The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle […], volume (please specify |volume=I to IV), London: Harrison and Co., […], →OCLC

Questions about gone backwards

What is gone backwards the past participle of?
Gone backwards is the past participle of go backwards.

Words near gone backwards in the dictionary

  1. gone back in time
  2. gone back on
  3. gone back to
  4. gone back to the drawing board
  5. gone back to the tools
  6. gone backwards
  7. gone bad
  8. gone ballistic
  9. gone balls up
  10. gone bananas
  11. gone bankrupt

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: gone backwards (page history and authors); go backwards (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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Cite this entry: “gone backwards.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/gone_backwards. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.